Review: Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy

After a series of relatively recent novels it was a bit of a jolt to go back nearly 150 years with Thomas Hardy. I read much of Hardy in my youth and I remember it provided a longed-for escape from grim 1970’s Glasgow. Much of what I loved about Hardy came flooding back – the nostalgia for a rural way of life long since vanished;  the vivid and acute descriptions of the Wessex landscape and villages and the creation of compelling, if sometimes infuriating, characters such as Bathsheba and Sergeant Troy (Gabriel is a bit of a bore, is he not)?

But reading Far From the Madding Crowd again in the very different world of 2019, I found myself torn between the lyricism of Hardy’s writing and the ‘world-view’ that underpins the story. Hardy wrote the story during the high water mark of Victorian England. The country was rigidly organised by social class and morality was dictated from on-high by the Church of England: people knew their place. To be sure, Hardy was in many ways a fervent critic of the Victorian establishment – but what did he want to put in its place? Well, let’s first consider the story and how Hardy tells it.

In barest outlines we are dealing with a love story in which beautiful, headstrong Bathsheba Everdene is pursued by three very different men. Stolid, loyal Gabriel is first  to fall for her but she rejects his prosaic advances. Late she draws the attention of a wealthy, middle-aged farmer – William Boldwood – by a thoughtless Valentine prank, but she has no romantic interest in him either. However, Boldwood persists and comes to believe that she might marry him regardless. Alas, Bathsheba then encounters the dashing soldier, Sergeant Troy, with whom she makes a catastrophic marriage. 

Hardy leaves us in no doubt that Bathsheba’s predicament is a simple consequence of the fact that she is female. Although Hardy occasionally toys with the idea that men can be prisoners of their emotions too, he makes it abundantly clear that in letting their hearts rule their heads, women are the weaker sex. To be fair to Hardy he does portray Bathsheba as in many ways a remarkable woman – taking charge of the family farm as she does was not thought of as women’s work. ..but

When Sergeant Troy disappears, presumed drowned, Bathsheba again reveals her feminine weakness. Unable to sustain the fortitude necessary to carry on alone she allows herself to be browbeaten into rekindling her relationship with Boldwood. The dreaded engagement is all but formalised when Troy miraculously reappears to scupper Boldwood’s happiness once again. Poor Boldwood, out of his mind with frustrated love shoots Troy dead so leaving the coast clear for the faithful Gabriel. But the Gabriel and Bathsheba who finally wed are not the young and wilful pair from the beginning of the story – their union is not one of high emotion but of mutual understanding.

Of course there is much more, and much more complexity to the story than this 21^stCentury critique suggests. Hardy allows Gabriel and Bathsheba to finally wed but that is after many asides about the folly of love and the disappointments of married life – most brutally expressed by Troy: ‘All romances end at marriage’. Nor is it necessarily a happy ending,  as the tale is rounded out by Joseph Poorgrass’ observation that ‘it might have been worse’. 

Neither is Bathsheba the only one who lets her heart rule her head. Smallwood literally goes mad with grief when his years of wooing Bathsheba come to nought. And Hardy starts the book by having Gabriel fall in love with Bathsheba, showing that even the most sensible of men are vulnerable to the irrational desires of the heart. But Gabriel does not fall apart when Bathsheba rejects him, nor when he loses his flock of sheep and with it his livelihood. He battles stoically on until eventually he gets his just reward.

Gabriel then seems to be the character whom we are meant to admire and respect. Admirable in his approach to daily life, he does his best without complaint. His only unorthodoxy is his less than enthusiastic religious temperament. This chimes with Hardy’s disregard for the church and Victorian morality. A little less religion and a little less social hypocrisy seems to be the prescription; not a terribly inspiring message for such an unequal society as that Hardy was writing in.

Looking beyond the plot though, Hardy’s evocation of the Wessex landscape is wonderful. From his description of how a winter coat of ice and snow alters the way the moon illuminates the landscape to his celebration of the star-strewn night sky, with the earth rotating palpably beneath it, Hardy brings the west country to life so vividly you can just about smell it.

In a similar way his deep knowledge of the country he is writing about enables him to capture a whole way of life – from the harvesting, to the sheep shearing to the country fairs. Everything is brought to life with such loving detail that you feel you know this world. Whenever I am in the west country Wessex feels more real to me than the ‘real’ counties like Dorset and Somerset and I wonder if some of those flocks of sheep do not belong to Gabriel and Bathsheba’s descendants.

Finally it is worth just noting how Hardy expected his readers to be familiar with The Bible and serious literature. Even the least educated of his yokels could quote, albeit badly, from the Old Testament and Hardy used many biblical stories to emphasise, or undermine, his account of the goings on in Wessex. This as much as anything reminds us that Hardy and the world he wrote about have long since disappeared.